Dust Planet Duplicity: A Forgotten Worlds Parody
by Quillon42
Summary: What happens when SHOPgirl Sylphie Mirabella grows weary of her lonely existence? She does her best to take full advantage of the so-many-seconds interval she gets with the Forgotten Soldiers when they stride into her place, that's what. Unfortunately for her, they're not interested in what she's trying to sell them.


DUST PLANET DUPLICITY (A Forgotten Worlds Parody)

(I love Forgotten Worlds…there's just something so stylish to it, in terms of the music, sound effects, and stuff. This is a lighthearted tribute to one of my favorite Arcade and Sega Genesis games of all time.)

(Nobody dies at the end, by the way…it's all just in good fun).

Just another afternoon sifting through her handiwork in _The Stage Boss Sentinel_. The young shopkeep couldn't help but sigh as she sat in the tiny boutique, visually sifting through printed words once arranged on paper by the young woman herself. Sylphie Mirabella—and this was her full name, to clear up the confusion between continents, just like the controversy regarding the Nintendo Princess nomenclature, concerning Peach versus Toadstool—she was tired of being shunted into the space behind the counter of the SHOP all her life. Sure, the loved moonlighting as an offbeat journalist when she was not on the store shift, seeking tips from certain sources for headlines informing heroes as to the weaknesses of oppressive overlords…although even that was draining at times, given what she would have to do to get the story on occasion. Really; taking out all that floating trash for Reptilian Thugs, just to find that the Paramecium's weakness was his exposed heartlike aperture. What a mystery to solve.

What Sylphie really wanted, she reflected as she stared a second at a floor clustered with devastating artillery, all available wholesale, was…

"Hey, Sylph."

"Ay there, girl!"

The girl looked up from her self-contributed periodical, her clear blue eyes sparkling as she beheld the two men who moved her more than any other.

Those intergalactic worldfaring-wifebeater-wearing warriors, the Forgotten Ones, they once again strode into her SHOP and her life once more, if only for another mere twenty seconds.

It was always the case that the two of them, the white wanderer known as Forgotten One and the black battler revered as Forgotten Two, those two always strolled right in, making the young woman's day or evening, and then in the space of less than a minute, they rolled right out again before she could begin to learn anything about either of them. Well, this time was going to be different.

Sylphie adjusted the SHOP clock, heretofore shorter than the shot clock in a pro basketball game, so that the timer actually allowed for two whole minutes instead of the regular twenty-second interval. The girl was determined to speed up the week-to-week process of her dual courtship a bit.

"So…" she said, batting her alluring eyelashes at both of the men as they hovered over her, "what can I do you for this evening? May I interest you in…"

"We're here this time not for the usual weapons fare, my lady," started Forgotten Two, "rather, we just wanna buy some…presents…for some special people."

Sylphie raised an amber eyebrow at this. "Special?" She was so sure that she herself was the most special person for the Forgottens—at least, that was how she pictured it during all these dreary days in her commercial incarceration.

"Yeah," replied Forgotten One, as he adjusted his shades and his infamous strapped undershirt. "I'd like to get a Flying Stone again…but not for myself."

"And an Aura Stone for me, too," said Forgotten Two, "but yeah, it's for…a really nice person."

_You're effing kidding me,_ thought Sylphie as she looked to One, then to Two, then back to One again. "So…" she began, waveringly, "you want someone else to be able to…fly around faster, and become more powerful, respectively…?"

"I have someone whom I want to see float up a bit more freely, yes," Forgotten One said, in reference to the Flying Stone.

"Yeps! I want my intended giftee to have more…oomph, shall we say!" put in Forgotten Two.

Sylphie allowed herself to breathe in and out slowly. She was so sure that she was the only lady with whom either of the men had come into contact for the longest of millennia… "But I was hoping that maybe I could interest you in a lethal Laser…some nasty Napalm…I've got some of the finest First Aid Treatment for ya, and I lowered the price to just 7500 Zenny…just for the both of you…"

Forgottens One and Two just exchanged puzzled glances at this.

"I mean, I'll take ninety percent off the new Balcan Cannon that I just got in!" Sylphie's hands were dancing along the left side of her counter, indicating the floor where the supposed weapon lay. (She really didn't have a new Balcan in, but was just buying herself literally a few more seconds). "This one has three-way capability now…kind of like what its indicating symbol seems to suggest (though you know, it never really, or at least always, worked that way)…and like, I was thinking, maybe we could enjoy the three-way, I mean, oh Gods, like, maybe you could enjoy the three-way, meaning like each of you, with your imposing guns, I mean…"

She knew that she was babbling helplessly now, and with only twenty seconds left on the SHOP clock, she didn't have much chance left to score.

"Look, I'm sorry, baby," put in Forgotten Two once more, "but we two are already…betrothed."

Sylphie shivered a shudder at this notification, news more devastating than any expose in the _Sentinel_ on a given level boss.

One looked at her with the most tenderness he could muster (which was really only so much). "Yeah, um, we were meaning to tell you. I'm giving myself away to the blue wrestling giant in the penultimate battle area…Two here's gonna spend the rest of his life with the red one."

The girl's sapphire irises wanted to detonate spontaneously at hearing the words that just now emanated from One's mouth. "Laidin and Whodin?!" she sputtered helplessly, knowing their names from the story she did on them in one of the last issues of the rag for which she wrote.

Two only nodded grimly a second, unaware of the harm he had inflicted upon the lady's life-pack-power-up of a heart. "S…sorry, baby! We were all double-dating for a spell now…"

"…And we didn't want to say anything, but…well…" One stopped to compose himself before a stunned Sylphie. "It's just that Laidin…completes me. …Or Whodin. Whichever one it is. The blue one."

"Yeah, and the red one for me!" Two chimed in, unhelpfully. One just shot the other a look from behind his terminating shades.

"Well, you both have just a few seconds left," was all the young woman could say, she thoroughly stymied and crushed. "Please plunk your Zenny down, then, and be off."

Forgotten One and Forgotten Two did so, and retrieved their newly-acquired Stones before the girl could get an idea to punch them in their more long-held bodily ones.

_And do you think the BIOS War Tyrant's painted-on tight brown pants are hot too, you conch-teasing cretins?!_ Sylphie thought as the soldiers left the SHOP. _All this time…!_

Laidin and Whodin; the Whodunit of the murder regarding the girl's precious, precocious, pulverized heart was now ever-so-bitterly solved, she wishing she could displace the men from her mind, though she knew that she would never forget the Forgottens.

A few beats and the soldiers found themselves admiring what they nabbed in the SHOP while standing some paces away from it, out of earshot of the magnificent blonde maiden within.

"I actually felt sort of bad, lying to the girl, even though we were sparing her feelings, you know?" said Forgotten Two to the other.

"Yeah," said Forgotten One, as his thumb and forefinger slid over the Flying Stone, "but you know, it had to be done. As I said during our most lauded adventure, it was a damn shame that my date with Cleopatra was spoiled—and I was being literal about that, as well. Fortunately, I found another Egyptian squeeze…and Lord, will Yafeuia ever love this rock when she sees it. Man, you should see her; my God—talk about Ymesketit."

"Hmm," said Two, in smug assent, thinking of his own girl, the Japanese Yaritechan, whom he met during one of his sweeps across the later, Feudal parts of the forgotten landscape. "It's actually ironic that we mentioned Laidin and Whodin, given that I met my own old lady while you and I were on our way to pay our respects to those two giants."

"To think that we would swing that way…well, not that there's anything wrong with that…"

"Nope, of course not."

Even in the twenty-ninth century, the PC gayness-sanctioning qualification from a situation comedy almost a thousand years old still applied readily.

"Come on," said Forgotten Two, "let's not think beat ourselves up about Sylphie. She's a good girl. 'Sides…if things don't work out with my current baby, I got Miss Mirabella as my whitegirl fallback."

This was met with a raised eyebrow by the Forgotten One.

"_Your_ fallback…Sylphie was going to be _my_ Forgotten Fallback…!"

"No way, man!" Forgotten Two's hands grasped rigidly for his automatic rifle. "You can't handle a woman like that anyway!"

"Did _you_ find the gal?" One queried tauntingly, hinting at the fact that he saw Sylphie Mirabella first, so many quests and levels back, and not Two.

The other, at hearing this, was certainly indignant: "I'll finish you for sure!"

And so Forgotten One and Forgotten Two commenced to blasting at one another with the weapons at their disposal, rotating and shelling all while Sylphie stewed in her SHOP, miserably and obliviously burying her face in another issue of _The Stage Boss Sentinel_—just another paper presaging the already-won and eventually-to-be-forgotten level leader scuffles of long past.


End file.
